End of Class Reflection for Th. 7/7/11

One of the issues that I wanted to explore after our discussion in class is what does urban mean? Is it a place where there is a high concentration of people surrounded by infrastructure? Often when the word urban education is used it is connotated with schools with high concentration of students of color from low-income backgrounds. Urban education often refers to inner-city schools, which suggests schools in the heart of the city and within the problem areas of a city. Urban schools are connotate schools that lack the abundant resources to meet their students' needs.

I enjoyed that Professor Grandson was explicit about "who" we are talking about when we say urban education.
I've just realized that we have taken a word "urban" and have attached social things to that word. Were urban areas always places with high concentration of people of color and low-income individuals?

What about the wealthier areas of of a city? Would a school that is predominantly white with higher income levels be considered urban?

In researching to understand what we mean by urban education I found the following useful resources:

1. What Makes Any School an Urban School?

1. The school is located in a urban area rather than a rural, small town, or suburban area
2. The school has a relatively high rate of poverty (as measured by Free and Reduced Lunch data provided by the NYSED)
3. The school has a relatively high proportion of students of color (as reported by NYSED)
4. The school has a relatively high proportion of students who are Limited English Proficient (as reported by NYSED)
5. The school has been designated as "High Need" by NYSED.

http://www.oswego.edu/~prusso1/what_makes_any_school_an_urban_s.htm

AND

2. Urban Education

• Urban education refers to educating students in public schools in metropolitan areas.
• These schools often operate in a context of poverty, diversity, and crime.
• Urban schools typically exist within large, possibly bureaucratic school systems that may lack the resources to handle the challenges faced in educating every student given the diversity they represent.
http://myweb.usf.edu/~aheindel/UrbanEducation.html